Today, everybody knows that
Copernicus' heliocentric solar system replaced Ptolemy's geocentric
system, with only a little trouble between Galileo and the Church.
The paradigm has shifted.

[Or has it? Astrologers still use Ptolemy's geocentric star
charts to cast horoscopes and foretell the future. If success is
measured by the dollars they earn, then some are more successful
than the astronomers who know where the planets orbit.]

But what did Copernicus' contemporaries think about the
paradigm shift that was in progress around them? Owen Gingerich,
professor of the history of astronomy at Harvard, spent 30 years
researching hundreds of original copies of Copernicus' book, De
Revolutionibus. He was looking for the notes their owners had
scribbled in the margins. Many of these notes indicated the readers
didn't believe that Copernicus was claiming that the Sun was the
center of the solar system (or if he was saying that, he must be
wrong.) These astronomers thought the heliocentric system was a
mathematical trick. The geometry of calculating planetary orbits was
easier if you pretended that the sun was at the center even though
everyone knew it wasn't. Copernicus' math was being used by
astronomers who still believed the Earth was the center of the
universe. Is this what a half- shifted paradigm looks like?

Fast-forward to the present paradigm-in-flux. Today we are
discovering that the space around us is mostly plasma. First the
Earth's plasma field surprised us, then Jupiter's. Most astronomers
today will say that the Sun is a ball of hot plasma, but they still
haven't realized that this means that electric currents are
involved. But they do recognize the magnetic fields (because
magnetism is easier to detect than currents) which exist in complex
arrays all over the Sun.

From the standard description of the (above) TRACE
ultraviolet image of the sun: "The bright glowing gas flowing around
the sunspots has a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius.
The reason for the high temperatures is unknown but thought to be
related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel
solar plasma." But magnetic fields must also cool the sunspots by
blocking the sun's nuclear heat from below. From another sunspot
description: "The [sun]spot is thought to be caused by large
magnetic fields that inhibit hot matter from flowing to the
surface."

In an electric universe, the heat is an expected side-effect
of the electric currents which induced the magnetic fields. And the
cooling isn't needed at all, because the electric phenomena of the
Sun's surface is all that is needed to heat the sun. The
out-of-sight nuclear furnace isn't even there, so there's no need to
call upon magnetic forces for blocking the nuclear heat.

Hannés Alfvén devoted some of his Noble Prize acceptance
speech to begging astronomers not to interpret space plasmas as
isolated magnetic interactions. In a few specific cases, called
"quiescent plasmas," magnetic energy is equal to electric current,
so the electric currents can be ignored. But the Sun is NOT a
quiescent plasma. The magnetic fields observed on the sun are
induced by powerful electric currents. These electric current, not
the magnetic fields, are the cause of the heating that baffles the
astronomers. These electric currents can explain not only the high
temperatures around sunspots, but also the whole life-cycle of
stars.

Plasma cosmologists are like Copernicus, boldly asserting
since the late 1800's that the Sun is an electric phenomenon.
Astronomers still cling to the belief that you can't get charge
separation in space. But that belief will have to crumble as new
data erodes it. And eventually the electrically neutral universe
will sound as old-fashioned to our ears as the geocentric solar
system does today. The paradigm is already shifting.